About NextAfter

We aren’t exactly sure who first decided that charities and caused-based organizations should be given a label that expresses what they are not (i.e. nonprofit, non-governmental organization, not-for-profit), but since these are whom we serve, we decided to follow suit.

We were blessed to make the Inc. 500’s list of fastest growing companies in 2016.

NextAfter is a non-agency. We’re also not a nonprofit.

But we very much are a cause-based organization. Our cause is to unleash the most generous generation in the history of the world. To do that we have constructed a new type of company that combines the perpetual learning of a marketing and fundraising Research Lab with the practical application of a Consultancy. NextAfter works alongside nonprofits to develop research as to why their donors give and put those learnings into practice to help them reach more people, acquire more donors, and generate more dollars to fund their world-changing work.

Our Mission is Too Big for Just Us

We are not naïve. We realize that no matter how big, or how fast our company grows, we will never be able to work with enough organizations to make a dent in our mission to create a widespread, pervasive personal generosity. So we’ve made a decision early on to open-source all of our work. Every experiment that we perform is carefully documented, validated, and published in our growing online Digital Fundraising Research Library. It is free to access, requires no login, and contains everything that we have learned from performing 1,610 unique experiments spanning a combined sample of more than 254,298,415 donor interactions.

Three Things We Know To Be True

We make this all available to the world for free because we have discovered three things to be true:

NextAfter can’t accomplish this mission on our own. We are not a nonprofit, and we do not accept donations. Our nonprofit clients and research partners do, but alone NextAfter cannot inspire anyone to give. So as much as our clients say that they need us, the exact opposite is true— we need our clients and partners to help us decode generosity and find out what really works in fundraising.

The learnings from our experiments do not belong to us alone. Because the results of every experiment are voluntarily (and generously) “donated” to the NextAfter Research Library by our clients and research partners, we feel a tremendous responsibility to steward those resources well. That’s why we take painstaking effort to record each experiment and make them available to the nonprofit community at-large. It’s our hope that these learnings can help raise the bar for fundraising and marketing communication in the nonprofit community.

Inspiring generosity requires us to practice it first. The most valuable thing that we have to offer is the knowledge acquired from each of our experiments. By giving it all away, we not only do we “practice what we preach”, but it also keeps us motivated to continue to explore new ways and new possibilities for inspiring people to give.